College letter of recommendation is essentially a support document that students can submit together with their application forms. Despite being optional however, it plays a big role in their decision for the students. As such, you might find yourself needing a guide on writing a college letter of recommendation when you’re tasked with writing one.
It’s worth mentioning too that writing a college letter of recommendation isn’t that easy. In fact, it’s more complex than usual since there’s no set guidelines or requirements that you can use for all sorts of colleges.
So, since it’s this complicated, let’s just get started.
The Planning Stage
Before you start writing a college letter of recommendation, ask yourself these questions.
Am I the correct person to write this letter?
A good college letter of recommendation needs to be written by someone that’s close with the candidate. It comes from someone who’s had experiences with the person first hand and knows their strengths and qualities first hand also.
So, try answering this question first before you start writing a college letter of recommendation.
That being said, even if you didn’t feel qualified enough to write it yourself, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should ditch out on writing the letter either. Just keep that thought in mind when you’re writing a college letter of recommendation.
Can I provide positive endorsements for the candidate?
The next question you should ask yourself is whether you’re able to be positive and in their court for providing endorsements for them in the letter. Letters of recommendation are often positive in nature, so if you only managed to come up with a neutral, or even lukewarm approach to your student, it can lead to negative results instead.
Do I have the relevant information to write one?
Next thing to ask yourself is whether you have the information about the student prepared to write into the letter of recommendation itself. Not only that, you should also ask yourself whether you have the relevant information about where they want to be recommended onto.
Both of these things play important roles, one is to make sure that you can endorse them as a student. And second to make sure that you’re able to follow the guidelines and formatting that the college requested their letter of recommendation to be.
College Letter of Recommendation Free Download
The Stage Writing a College Letter of Recommendation
Now that you’re done planning the letter of recommendation, it’s time to proceed by writing a college letter of recommendation. Since letter of recommendation format differs by colleges and universities, we can’t really give you out a specific advice, and will instead settles with general writing tips for letter of recommendation.
Don’t rely on cliches
When you’re writing a college letter of recommendation, avoid using cliches as examples and words in them. This will only make you seem unprofessional and try hardy instead of the professional impression you want to give them.
Provide specific examples
As you write your letter of recommendation, make sure to provide examples, the more specific the better, to support your claims towards the candidate. Doing this will help them believe in you even more, and as a writer who’s qualified enough to write this letter, you should have enough information to comfortable write one.
Use narrative and avoid lists
Narrative tells a better story, literally, for your college letter of recommendation. Sure, you can write their strengths and qualities by listing the out one by one, but it doesn’t really have the oomph you wanted for writing a college letter of recommendation that will leave an impression on the college admission committee.
Conclusion
And that’s all for this article for writing a college letter of recommendation. Unfortunately, we can’t really provide ALL the necessary writing tips, examples, and templates associated with letter of recommendation.
However, we still hope that it helps you in writing one, and if it does, make sure to share it with someone else.
They might need it, and you can be the one to save their day. That’s all from us for now. See you later.
